St. Paul Asylum Seeker With Work Permit and No Criminal Record Sent to Guantánamo's Camp Six

Adam Abdullah, 31, an auto mechanic in St. Paul who came to the United States as an asylum seeker in 2023, told MPR News in an interview published September 9, 2026 that he is being held at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Six — the facility built two decades ago for people accused of terrorism. He holds a valid work permit and a Social Security number and has no criminal history.

ICE stopped his vehicle on December 12, 2025 during Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration surge into the Twin Cities. Abdullah says the officers produced no warrant and gave no explanation for targeting him. Over the following nine months he was moved from the Freeborn County Jail in Albert Lea, Minnesota, to a detention center in Covington, Kentucky, and then to Louisiana. He was then shackled at the wrists and ankles and flown to Guantánamo on what officials told him would be a deportation flight to Somalia — described to him at the time as a refueling stop.

He has been there roughly two weeks as of the interview. He says he has been given no further explanation of his status or why he remains. He reports being one of eight people from Somalia held at Guantánamo, several of them arrested in the Twin Cities.

What makes this a structural event rather than an individual injustice. Guantánamo’s Camp Six was built for a specific legal theory about people accused of terrorism. Abdullah is a work-authorized asylum seeker with no criminal record, moved there through the ordinary detention system — county jail, Kentucky, Louisiana, then a flight he was told was going somewhere else. No new authority was announced and no designation was made public; the existing removal apparatus simply terminated at a different place. If eight people from one city can be routed to Camp Six on a deportation flight that did not deport them, the question is not what Abdullah did but what the pipeline is now able to do without saying so.

The Twin Cities detail matters for the same reason. This timeline has tracked Operation Metro Surge from its January command handover through the independent tracker’s count of the 5,000th detainee flown out of MSP in August. Abdullah’s arrest is inside that operation, and his destination is outside anything the operation was described as doing.

Sourcing note. Every fact above comes from Abdullah’s own account to MPR News, corroborated by Democracy Now!, Reason and Truthout working from the same interview. No independent confirmation of his location has been obtained from ICE, DHS, or the Department of Defense, and none of the cited reporting contains an agency response confirming or denying that he is at Guantánamo. The eight-Somali figure is his count from inside the facility. The MPR URL carried in the capture ledger returned a 404 and was corrected here to the live article.